Comments on Uni as a "storytelling game" vis-a-vis an RPG

[CPXB]

I was writing down my game notes and my general comments section turned into an impromptu essay.  Here it is:

This is the first Universalis game that feels like a reasonably normal RPG.  Right now, it "feels" like it could keep going as long as we continue interest in the game, which is cool.  I was thinking about this and thinking about Universalis in general.  A fairly consistent critique of Uni is that it is a "storytelling" game.  I've opposed this view but . . . it's definite a fair critique.

   Because the game mechanics stress paying for actions, control, adding and subtracting traits it often feels like the people involved are mechanically creating a story with fairly minimal role-playing – and I mean that in the sense of people getting in character and playing their character.  There's always this awareness that there's a plot to be advanced and you've got to do it.  Speaking with others, they've also told me that they often have a sense of immediacy about it.   Not only do they have to advance the plot, they have to do it RIGHT NOW.

   Also, in the tenets phase, it's easy to write in there all these really earth-shaking things.  This tends to make the games these huge deals, with the characters changing the very fabric of the setting by their actions.  Which is fine, of course.  But afterwards the game setting isn't the same place.  In most of the Uni games I've had, when an "adventure" was done, there was a strong sense of closure.  Akin to trying to play Frodo after Mt. Doom.  What do you do to top that?  Best not to even try and start anew.

   And while I love unified mechanics that allow all conflicts to be resolved with equal game importance, this is a slight problem in Uni because what generally happens in social complications is a player goes, "OK, let's start the complication.  These components in my control are trying to alter the behavior of those components in your control."  There is no real dialog based preamble, either.  So, the dice are rolled, traits are added and subtracted and mostly without actual role-playing.  The focus is on the adding and subtracting of traits, not the flow of the dialog, not role-playing.

   All of this, together, I think, makes it really easy for Uni to become, functionally, a storytelling game with some role-playing elements rather than a role-playing game.

   In this game, however, we've managed to avoid almost all of that.  By intentionally making sure the game wasn't earth-shaking in scope, there is plenty of narrative room.  Finishing an adventure doesn't radically alter either the characters or the game world to such an extent that it would be a wholly different game to continue on, and the events are so incredibly important that afterwards there's a "what are you gonna do after destroying the One Ring, Frodo?" feeling.  This also mostly gets rid of the immediacy problem, too, at least with me (I haven't verified with others, yet, hehe).  Because the WHOLE UNIVERSE is not in the balance, there's never an urge to really get on with everything right this moment.

   Even the last issue, with social complications, I've thought of a way around it: you don't call for the roll until after the role-play to establish the desired changes have been done.  So, you don't have your character (meaning, of course, a component in your control) walk up to the guard (in someone else's control) and say, "I start a complication".  The hero tries to bluff the guard and when the guard is going, "Well, I dunno . . . ." THEN you make the roll for the complication.  (This happened accidentally when Ralphie convinced Lo Pan to go after Tran.  Me and Aaron had been role-playing for laughs for a while at that point I decided after several minutes of play to call for the complication.  It worked very well, IMO.)

   It also helped that we decided to model game play off of TV series that are good models for role-play (Firefly and Cowboy Bebop).  I think I also helped, personally, by making efforts to have at least one scene per session that is largely devoted to interpersonal relationships.

   So, needless to say, I think things are going well.  The game is funny and fun, but without a lot of silliness and that lurking sense of drama underneath it.  Something serious is going on, here, and there are many very serious people in the world doing very serious things.  But there's room for laughs, too.  Which is also true to the source material.

[Mike Holmes]

Hmmm. First, I don't consider "storytelling game" to be a critique of Universalis. To whatever extent it is different than a RPG for the people playing it, you are the only person who's reported this as a problem that I can recall. Oh, some people say that they'd prefer to play something more like a RPG, but they note that they also enjoy this. Even you don't seem to find it grossly objectionable. So very much this is a "critique" of Universalis like somebody saying "I prefer Clue over Monopoly" is a critique of Monopoly. Rather it isn't, it's a statement of preference. And Universalis (despite it's name) simply isn't going to appeal to everyone. What game does? So what you call "critique" sounds to me just like a categorization.

Actually, I've been pretty proud for a long time to have created something that's not a RPG. I cherish the "storytelling game" assignation. Proves we thought outside the box. If it caused problems for people playing, I wouldn't be proud of it. But I haven't seen any problems.


But what's more telling than this is that your observations on how play occurs seem very local to me. Maybe it's just my own play biases here, but when I play there's no lack of dialog (no less dialog than I have in any other RPG I play), and no sense of immediacy causing me or anyone else to push the plot forward without spending time on small details. No failure to do the dialog on social conflicts (I use resolution systems in all my RPGs for social conflicts, and don't believe in the "Roll or Role" dichotomy for this). Nor any of the effects of tenets like you note.

In fact, all the play I know of is actually like the play that you say you're now experiencing in this latest game.

Now, it could be that, as a role-player for forever, I am pushing play to be more RPGish than it would otherwise be when I'm participating. Most Universalis players are also RPG players to start, so perhaps they're also pushing the play more towards RPG play. It's hard to say for absolute certain what the rules as written tend to promote. You have your annecdotal evidence, and I have mine.

But, given that we're sure that any group can "convert" to more RPG-like play without doing a whole lot, I'm pretty darn sure that there's no real issue here. That is, the game was designed to be pretty flexible and to be the game that people wanted it to be. Gimmicks aside, the way people use the basic mechanics tends to bend to their needs. We noted that after the first few playtests.

So...all I'm seeing is a resounding endorsement here. Not a "hey, look, it can be fixed," but a "Hey, look, it works as written. We put into effect what we wanted to see for the story, and got the play product we desired."

So thanks!
Mike

[CPXB]

I meant "critique" in a fairly philosophical sense, as in thoughtful commentary on the subject, not in a more vernacular sense of "criticism" where someone merely points out something's flaws.  I don't think that playing Uni as a storytelling game is a problem (except to the extent that I, personally, am more interested in RPGs than a storytelling game), but it is something that has been brought up a fairly large number of times both offline and online, such as my review of Uni on RPG.net.

Otherwise, yeah, it could certainly be local.  Me and Adrienne got to Maine as pretty traditional gamers and all of our first set of gaming friends were also very traditional gamers, and many of them in particular coached in gaming by a guy who is very dysfunctional, hehe.  Then we got the indie RPG bug and our gaming habits changed fairly radically.  So, many of my attempts to introduce Uni to people . . . ended poorly because the traditional gamers had no interest in many of the concepts of the game (the GMless nature of the game, lack of player characters and the ability to change the rules in the middle of the game; yes, I know all of these could be fixed, but those are the most frequent comments why the traditional gamers in this area don't like the game).  So, for a longish time I tried to fit the square peg into the round hole, trying to convince my then current set of gaming friends that Universalis and a fair number of small press and indie games are really cool and they should try them with very mixed results rather than look for people who would be interested in that from the get-go.

[Mike Holmes]

I get where you're coming from - I'm one of the designers, and I have friends who refuse to play the game. But, then, I also have friends who won't play Monopoly. The point being that preferences are preferences, and trying to "convert" people from theirs is difficult to impossible. So I don't try much any more. Instead I find somebody else with a different preference to play with.

For Universalis, that "somebody else" tends to be people who have not played RPGs forever, or who are at least already open to playing lots of RPGs, for me. Often people who've never played an RPG before, or, interestingly, who boardgame a lot. I know there's this tendency to want to play what we want with the people that we play other things with, and that's natural. It's just not practical at times, unfortunately.

Mike

[Arturo G.]

Well, I must admit I was one of that kind of players. The first time I arrived at The Forge I was looking for advise on RPG design, but I was still reluctant to really change my mind. The first time I read a review about Universalis I immediately decided I was not interested on it at all.
It took me far more reading, some mind-opening threads, and reading a couple of free-games (like The Pool) to realize what were people talking about here and what was the potential of the indie-games in general.

I must thank Ron a lot for a couple of posts in several threads were he was complaining about people concentrating in the theory forums and not contributing to Actual Play or Indie Design. Reading actual-play was what opened my eyes definitively. At the end, Universalis was the first indie-game I bought, and the first I have played.

I agree with Mike that it is not possible to convince people to play to something they don't like. If you try hard the typical reaction is to make them dissapointed and more reluctant to try.
But my advice is that perhaps, if you let them notice (without any pressure) about how much are you enjoying it, and the kind of stories you are creating, and especially you make them get the feeling of how a Universalis session is, only perhaps, they will give you a chance. I have managed to do it with a couple of people.

Good luck,
Arturo